Michael Asher

Mark Lewis

A few years after I graduated from art school I received a
commission to do a public project in London’s East End. I had
begun to grow a little tired of just taking pictures
and with this new project I was trying to imagine other ways of
making art. While doing research I came across the work of
Michael Asher for the first time, and was immediately drawn to
its clarity, intelligence and unexpected beauty. What appealed
to me in particular was how Michael employed simple gestures
such as displacement, removal and erasure to open up a world of
possibility, a way of thinking about how art was touched by,
and in turn impacted on political and everyday economies.
Importantly Michael’s work seemed to achieve this orbit of
subtle connections and overdetermination without being in the
slightest bit didactic or pedantic. What his work invites us to
discover, we do so with pleasure. And it is this sense of
pleasure that the frighteningly technocratic and often lazily
invoked shorthand of Institutional Critique (typically used to
characterise Michael’s work) fails to capture.

Michael Asher, The
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., ‘73rd
American Exhibition’, June 9—August 5, 1979, 1979, colour
postcard of the installation in Gallery 219 published by the
Art Institute of Chicago after the ‘73rd American Exhibition’.
Courtesy the artist

The first work of Michael’s that I discovered was his famous
1979 project at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he removed
the bronze cast of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s
late-eighteenth-century sculpture of George Washington from the
front steps of the museum and installed it inside one of the
European Painting and Sculpture galleries. This work produced
different but complementary encounters for viewers both inside
and outside of the museum. On the one hand, and perhaps for the
first time since it was installed in 1917, passersby on
Michigan Avenue could notice, through its very absence, the
strange classical public monument that heretofore had cast an
increasingly misleading and certainly ambiguous shadow on the
modern and expansive aspirations of the Art Institute. On the
other hand, visitors to gallery 219, where Asher had
temporarily installed the missing public monument, could now
judge and appreciate Houdon’s work against other European works
of the same period, perhaps reckoning it to be aesthetically
weak by comparison. They could also speculate on the reasons
why this work more than any other had been chosen by the museum
at one time to announce its aesthetic (and necessarily
political) ambition – to appear almost like a cinematic trailer
hinting at the kind of experience you might expect once you
entered the building. The fact that few in 1979 neither paid
much attention to this public statue nor were likely to be
comprehensively persuaded by its increasingly outdated metonymy
was precisely the invisibility and the failed rhetorical
ambition that Asher’s work sought to foreground. His
intervention made the monument new again, staging it as an
artistic confrontation with the museum itself, one that the
latter was being asked to address, to defend or to denounce
perhaps, but at least to evaluate. And if the monument’s
metonymic effect was now judged to be ridiculous, or at the
very least contradictory, Michael’s work made those types of
judgement palpable and in turn demanded that considerations of
this type be applied to all works – and not only those, like
Houdon’s, that in retrospect had become aesthetically marginal.
But even this reading reduces the complexity and unexpected
pleasures that Michael’s work produced. For instance, looking
at Houdon’s statue, with its acquired patina of green corrosion
and filth, and now ensconced in the proper place for
aesthetic contemplation meant that a certain disinterestedness
was able to creep in alongside the institutional questions.
Viewers could consider, for instance, the monument’s classical
form, its status as a copy, its ‘groundedness’ (because removed
from its pedestal), its scale in relationship to other works
and to the human body, or even the general and perhaps defining
effect of rust and bird shit on the form itself. In other
words, for better or worse, under Michael’s guidance Houdon’s
monument became, for the duration of the exhibition, a piece of
sculpture – something to look at and think about. Michael
achieved all of this (and more) simply by displacing an object
from one place to another – and in so doing with a seemingly
effortless poetry he produced beauty out of absence and
provoked perplexing questions about aesthetic judgement through
supplement.

Like many young artists exposed for the first time to an
extraordinary and compelling work, I proceeded to make a number
of my own works that tried, more or less, to mimic something of
its effect – without much success I should add and I very
quickly (and wisely) abandoned the exercise. But Michael’s
influence continued, albeit more in the way that I looked at
art than in the way I made it. This is, I think, his work’s
huge achievement: it forces us to take absolutely nothing for
granted when looking at works of art, it asks that we consider
context, history and selection as part of our aesthetic
judgment without diminishing the beauty and the strangeness of
the works in question. At its best his work only adds to our
experience of looking at a work of art, taking nothing of its
value away.

In 2002 while I was preparing my exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern,
I asked the then director Bernhard Fibicher to tell me a little
bit about Michael’s exhibition there ten years earlier.
Bernhard showed me an array of photographic documentation and
he described in detail the way the work was conceived and how
it was installed. As is well known, for that exhibition Michael
organised the removal of the building’s heating radiators and
then had them re-installed all together, fully plumbed, in the
entranceway foyer. The originality of the work impressed me, as
did the way it gracefully and unexpectedly introduced questions
of institutional framing while giving visitors an unusual and
startling aesthetic experience. Again, to simply describe this
work as Institutional Critique or Conceptual art in some way or
another would completely miss its sheer oddness and beauty.
When you entered the Kunsthalle, you were immediately presented
with a magical sculptural form comprised of all the museum’s
radiators with their different colours and sizes, and complete
with multiple rows of piping trailing off to the underground
boiler, but you were also hit by an immense physical heat, and
this in stark contrast to the cold and empty galleries that
awaited you, now without either plumbing or art.

Two months ago we published an Afterall One Work
written by Anne Rorimer and dedicated to Michael’s Kunsthalle
Bern installation. I am proud that exactly thirty years after I
first learned about Michael Asher’s work we are able to present
an in depth consideration of a work by him that continues to
make a difference.